I’m always utterly flabbergasted when I learn that people really believe (or at least purport to believe) that Planned Parenthood is an evil cabal that actually wants to increase the number of abortions. To hear anti-choicers talk about Planned Parenthood sometime, you’d think all PP did was provide abortions. Maybe even in a drive through, like a car-wash. Drive in, get your uterus scraped out, be on you way. Voila. Except that that’s not how Planned Parenthood works at all. In fact, the majority of its services have nothing to do with abortion. Rather, Planned Parenthood provides gynecological services – including regular annual testing (to make sure women don’t have things like, you know, cervical cancer), STD testing, and contraception services – for low-income women who couldn’t otherwise afford to make sure they don’t have cancer, AIDS, or unwanted pregnancies. Seems like a pretty good mission, to me. And it just so happens that, on top of this, they also perform abortions.

And yet the nut job propaganda somehow persists that Planned Parenthood actually has some sort of inherent interest in upping the abortion rate. Via Pandagon, a lovely quote from a Minnesota article:

“Planned Parenthood has learned how to take advantage of teenagers and young women by marketing its brand and building relationships to create future abortion customers,” said MCCL executive director Scott Fischbach in a statement.

So PP is now branding abortions? Jesus christ. Amanda makes three very good points about why this line of thought is ridiculous:

1) Planned Parenthood is a non-profit organization, meaning it doesn’t need to make a profit or increase shareholder value or antyhing like that, and therefore it does not need to seek out more “customers”
2) It’s likely that Planned Parenthood actually loses money on abortions, since it’s a surgical procedure and more complicated than the other services PP provides, but prices are still kept extremely low so low-income women can afford it
3) Disregarding one and two, and assuming that PP is in the market to attract more “abortion customers,” isn’t providing birth control, condoms and other contraceptive services very cheaply (and sometimes freely) kind of defeating that mission, since they’re actually helping decrease the number of unwanted pregnancies?

Amanda writes:

Even if you can be convinced that Planned Parenthood wants to perform more abortions (which seems like they’d lose them money, since it’s minor surgery with prices kept low for pro-choice ideological reasons), it’s going to be hard to be convinced that they are upping the abortion rate with contraception. It’s like arguing that your doctor is setting you up for expensive open-heart surgery by giving you cholesterol-lowering drugs. But reality is no competition to the fever dreams of a misogynist sure that Planned Parenthood is luring the female property of patriarchs into its den of inequity.

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That must be why they charge $30 for “Emergency Contraceptive” packs that cost them less than $5.

That must be why they sell aborted fetuses wholesale to testing labs in parts or in their entirety, aborted and live born–the older the fetus, the more profit is made. The average fetus sold in these sales is in the 30 to 40 week old ratio.

Must be why they pass out condoms disquised as lolipops to children to get them to test out sex. Oh no, that couldn’t lead to an unwanted pregnancy! Good ol’ Planned Parenthood.

The abortions alone are a multi-billion dollar industry. At 4 thousand abortions ocurring per day (in the US), Planned Parenthood is raking in approximately $584 million a year, just on the cost of abortion, assuming it still costs $400, but that was a few years back now.